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Friday, 30 June 2017

POVERTY-STRICKEN VENDORS DEFY POLICE

Police in Swaziland have
arrested poverty-stricken women for selling firewood by roadsides.
The women say their children will starve if they are not allowed to continue
the trade.

Vendors at Mbadlane
threatened to either commit suicide or poison their children rather than
helplessly watch them die of hunger, the Sunday
Observer newspaper in Swaziland reported (25 June 2017).

There is a long-running
dispute between the women and police and recently firewood and products worth about
E9,000 (about US$700) were confiscated. Police and the Swaziland Environment
Authority (SEA) say the women are depleting the forest and destroying the
environment by collecting wood, something the vendors deny.

The police said they would
continue to enforce the law whenever they were called upon by the SEA. Despite
the threats the women have continued to trade.

The Observer reported, ‘Their argument is that they had no other source
of income, hence they will not abandon their business.’

The newspaper added, ‘Make
Nkenjane from Mbadlane has vowed to feed her children with poison as she will
not be able to feed them as this was her sole source of income being a single
parent.

Similar words were shared by another female vendor who vowed to hang
herself than watch her children wiped by hunger.’

The Observer reported one young man, who did not want his name
published, saying he would be forced into crime as he had no other way to sustain
himself and his siblings.

The newspaper added, ‘A
young woman, who requested not to be named in fear of victimisation, said she
would now resort to prostitution as all her wares were confiscated while she is
a breadwinner of both her siblings and children. She stated that both her
parents died due to HIV and [she] was now forced to look after the family, hence
she dropped out of school.’

Another woman said her
children would have to drop out of school because she had no money for fees,
uniforms and bus fares.

The Observer reported that women vendors from Mafutseni said their case
was worse than those at Mbadlane because they had been arrested on average
three times a month by police.

The Observer added, ‘The women also alleged that the police threatened
to shoot them whenever they tried to escape, saying firewood was now protected
like the wild animals.’

The newspaper reported, ‘Gogo
Dludlu said it is clear that government protects animals and trees more than
humanity.’

In Swaziland, nearly seven in 10 of the kingdom’s
estimated 1.3 million people live in abject poverty with incomes of less than
$US2 a day. Meanwhile, King Mswati III, who rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan
Africa’s last absolute monarch, lives a lavish lifestyle, with at least 13
palaces, fleets of top-of-the-range Mercedes Benz and BMW cars and at least one
Rolls Royce. He has a private jet airplane and is soon
to get a second.